Comment by romwell
8 years ago
I have a story in a similar vein, although a much less scary one.
In that instance, The Machine Cleaned Out My Desk.
I had a cubicle at the company HQ, but was for some period of time working from home in another state. I still kept quite a few things in the cubicle (notebooks, mugs, etc), which I used when I was in the area.
When I finally came back, I noticed, after a month or two, that my office number has not been updated in the system (from being "HOME OFFICE"), and sent a request to IT to change it.
The next day I came back to see a pristine desk.
With all my stuff gone.
See, my request to update the office number triggered a relocation request. The system, in preparation of the move-in of the "new" tenant (me) into my cubicle, has removed all the belongings of the previous tenant (which also happened to be me).
Luckily, all the removed stuff was put in a box, which I got back several days later, after my manager found the right person in the facilities dept.
Just goes to show that automating even the simplest procedures can be very tricky - and that perhaps it's best to have people on-site manually approve any destructive steps.
> automating even the simplest procedures can be very tricky
automating business processes is actually a similar activity to doing programming!
When it's done competently, the business runs smoother. But if there are bugs (and as anyone who programs knows, there are always bugs), things go wrong. And yet, people who know not anything about complex systems design attempt to write up business requirements for such automation are numourus.
Yes, you can actually program a bussines process using BPMN. Furthermore, there are tools that convert BPMN to the actual machine code automatically.
Or, stop letting the people with business degrees effectively write software via SAP. They're not trained for it, and they don't know how to think through edge cases or reduce fragile entanglements across areas of concern.
Idea: Require every action taken by an SAP or similar system be tagged with the name and telephone number of the MBA who created the action in SAP.
> perhaps it's best to have people on-site manually approve any destructive steps.
Or, almost certainly cheaper, manually deal with the 1 in 10,000 case like yours.
In this case, a simple notes field in the request system would perhaps have sufficed. Perhaps there is/was, and it wasn't filled out because it wasn't recognized as being some manner of exceptional request. Perhaps if there was manual approval, removal of your stuff would still have been approved.
It's literally impossible to catch all of these, because human error will creep in. Sounds to me like your case was dealt with adequately. (Perhaps not from your personal perspective!!)
>Or, almost certainly cheaper,
If my research notebooks actually ended up in the trash, the loss of productivity would have certainly not been cheaper compared to implementing a simple checkmark requiring the approval of the manager of the person whose desk was cleaned out.
Now that think about this, this is a clear example of the famous Frame problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_problem)
The next day I came back to see a pristine desk. With all my stuff gone.
Something like this happened to me too at a previous employer, some things I recovered but many were just gone, the cleaning staff apparently help themselves to stuff that “former” employees leave behind, so my fancy headphones for example were just gone. Fucks given by HR/facilities? Zero. One of many similar incidents for me and my cow-orkers. And this was a desk move literally from one row to another!
It wasn’t even an algorithm per se, most of the “machine” at this place was people in India following checklists manually. You could speak to them (tho' they made this very difficult to do) and tell them to stop and they would say “yes” and do it anyway.
I had a friend at another company who was mistakenly terminated, a week later his manager called him at home to find out if he was OK, the conversation apparently went,
Are you sick? What happened?
You fired me you bastard!
No I didn't! Please come back!
Too late now, I have another job.
A paper/protocol machine is still a machine, though. Sucks that it ate your headphones!
I am normally big on Solidarity with fellow Workers but the humans in this loop really should be automated away, because they knew what they were doing was a mistake and did it anyway, so what value were they adding? In fact they were worse than automation because at least that can be debugged, but there is no fix for the bureaucratic mindset.
Especially since you could tell them to stop and they would say "yes" and then carry on anyway...
Another story from the same company, group A would enter their requirements into system 1, group B would pick up work tickets from system 2. Group A thought that group B were idiots who could never do anything right, and group B thought that group A were idiots who could never make up their minds what they wanted.
But the real problem was group C who maintained systems 1 and 2 and "integrated" them with people in India manually rekeying from one to the other with frequent typos. They thought they were saving money but never considered the cost of delays and re-work in groups A and B...
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Did you threaten to call the police about theft? Could've followed through with the threat also.
I escalated it to building security, where I had some mates, and they reviewed what CCTV evidence there was but couldn't find anything.
I don't even really blame the cleaners; people left expensive electronics, phones, wallets, whatever on their desks all the time, never any issues at all, I don't think any of them would have taken anything that wasn't from the pile, it was probably at least tacitly sanctioned by their management (who probably helped themselves first too).
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"Ah you admit I was unfairly fired!" how about we settle for 9 months salary or my lawyers will be in touch.